DPL Reading List – October 26, 2018

How Facebook’s Messenger Got Its New Look in a New Jersey Basement – “…the key shaper of the new Messenger’s look is Christian Dalonzo, a 23-year-old who was still an undergraduate at Rowan University in New Jersey when he crafted the “bubbly” vibe of what was known internally as M4, announced today after a long gestation. He blueprinted the screen experience of a billion-plus people while living in the basement of his parent’s South Jersey home.”

AI’s Potential to Diagnose and Treat Mental Illness – “As with all potential breakthroughs, caveats remain and safeguards must be developed. Yet, there’s no doubt we’re on the cusp of an AI revolution in mental health — one that holds the promise of both better access and better care at a cost that won’t break the bank.”

Nintendo is bringing Labo to elementary school classrooms – “The program is currently in the pilot stage that’s being tested in New York schools. The Institute of Play is taking advantage of the pilot to develop a teacher’s guide for the Labo that will allow any elementary school classroom to use a Labo and Switch for STEM/STEAM learning. Once the pilot is complete, the program will expand to about 100 schools across the US.”

Quantum Computers Will Break the Encryption That Protects the Internet – “All this means that quantum-proofing the internet is shaping up to be an expensive, protracted and probably incomplete job. Dr Steel compares it to dealing with the millennium bug, when a quirk in how a lot of programs handled dates meant they had to be retrofitted, at great expense, to cope with the transition from the year 1999 to the year 2000. In the event, thanks to the efforts of thousands of programmers, the millennium bug was mostly dodged. These days, the stakes are higher. The world is now considerably more computerised than it was then. Either way, it means plenty of steady work for cryptographers.”

Innovate Better By Listening To Your Customers – “But many companies — large and small, startup and established — are guilty of not speaking with customers because “they believe what they believe.” Whether it’s ego or emotion guiding that belief, unless they have data to back it up, it’s just hypotheses. Shetty emphasizes that you should take that hypothesis and test it in order to learn early lessons. “We need to reframe [failure] as learning. If we can test those learnings early and often, then we’re so much better off.””